Has gold finally bottomed?

Gold appears to be the most hated asset these days, no-one wants it or its derivatives, e.g. miners, at any prices no matter how low they are. This will stop, however, because the best cure for low prices is low prices.

Here are some facts:

• Gold has undergone over 35% correction from all time nominal high ~\(1900/oz in August 2011. Up to know, the lowest tick was in the last days of June 2013 at just under ~\)1200/oz below the average production costs of ~$1300/oz.

• What is more interesting, the gold forward offering (GOFO) rates were in backwardation up to three month: as of today, the GOFO rates have been in a negative territory for more than a week. This has never happened before, and the few times that GOFO rate were negative [for few days][zfgofo], namely in 1999, 2001 & 2008, marked the bottom of gold correction.

  

• The large cap miners trade at discount to their book value. This is below what they were during the 2008 crash.

• The gold miners bullish percent index was zero several times in the last half year. It's like no one wants to own gold stocks these days.

  

• From the commitment of traders report data, the number of commercial net short positions is ~19k contracts, the lowest since 2002.

  

• From the Bank participation report, (major) US banks flipped from net short to net to net long in gold in the last 6 month of this correction (see this link). Barring any conspiracy theories, one may only wonder if smart money know something that we don't..

  

• Chinese gold import via Hong-Kong is higher than ever.

No matter how one twists this data, some is clearly anomalous, other may be suspicious to say the least, especially given current macroeconomic enironment. In light of this, one might wonder whether gold is mispriced. The sentiment is negative, and as of this month Rick Rule thinks we saw capitulation on behalf of the institutional investors.

This makes me wonder if this is how market bottom looks...